Is the hashtag #FightForWesternCivilization the worst thing on Twitter today?

I’m not sure that what Hitler was into could really be counted as “civilization.”

Once upon a time, or so the story goes, a reporter asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization.

“I think it would be a good idea,” Gandhi is said to have replied.

This story kept popping into my head as I worked my way through the seemingly unending torrent of horrendous Tweets that comprise the #FightForWesternCivilization hashtag on Twitter. I discovered the hashtag last night while looking at the reactions of assorted Internet-famous Nazis and their fellow travellers to the horrific attack in Nice yesterday. (You can see the results of this investigation in my previous post here.)

Even a quick glance at the #FightForWesternCivilization hashtag reveals that these would-be defenders of Western Civilization have a very strange notion of what civilization consists of, with some taking inspiration not just from Donald Trump, their lord and master, but from such historical figures as Adolph Hitler and Augusto Pinochet. The hashtag is lousy with raging Islamophobes and white supremacists, full of violent fantasies of retribution against the Muslim “invaders.”

Never mind that we don’t even know if the apparent killer in Nice was even motivated by radical Islam; neighbors told a French television station that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was less into religion than he was into women and salsa dancing. Local mosques say he never stepped through their doors.

But his name is Mohamed, so to those posting in the #FightForWesternCivilization hashtag he is not only a radical Islamist but the representative of all of the world’s Muslims.

As many of these self-declared civilization-defenders see it, Muslims are “savages” who need to be expelled from Europe and the US.

Regardless of their opinions about Jews, most of those using the hashtag seem to see”western civilization” as synonymous with “white culture.” Some tried to wake the “white man” to the alleged existential threat of Islam.

One inventive fellow argued that to win the war for Western civilization, right-minded right-wingers need to take aim not only at Islam but also such wily enemies as Buzzfeed, the long-defunct Soviet Union, Israel, Planned Parenthood and My Little Pony.

I first came to terms with how different my conception of what “western civilization” was to the alt-right’s definition when I came into contact with William Lind’s Victoria. I loved what I considered Western Civilization; stuff like human rights, democracy, open society, individualism, scientific and technological dynamism*, etc. But the protagonists of this work claim to support western civilization while destroying all these things.

It has become apparent to be that there are two incompatible visions of what Western Civilization. One I’d call “Enlightenment Civilization” which is what I’d support. And “Classical Western Civilization” that looks further back to things like the Crusades, the Romans. Seeing the time when white men oppressed black people and women as being the pinnacle rather than a darker time before western civilization came into its current standard of conduct.

*In Victoria the ‘utopia’ achieved by the end also regresses back to 1930s technology except for the military and medicine.

@BoinkBoinkBoinkBoinkBoinkBoink : well, Gengis Khan for me is at the civilization level of Napoleon. A dictatorial conqueror, but one who is good at administration stuff and whose imprint isn’t just “having killed a lot of guys”. Even if the bloody conqueror part isn’t something I forgive from them just because of the other part.

He is better than Alexander the Great in the civilization scale, but that’s not a terribly high bar :p

I would also say that Trump *isn’t* capitalism incarnate. Trump is what capitalism want to avoid. There’s a reason for which standard capitalism stand by very very high inheritance taxes.

@FreedomGeek ; TBH, the civilization they want to come back to never actually existed. It’s more that they project their fantasm on thoses poor romans and dark age guys. When they weren’t *that* evil, because that level of stupidity hinder survival, and they weren’t rich enough to be able to do that.

@Ohlman: was Genghis Khan that capable an administrator? I know his empire spun apart after his death, which is why the Mongols never got around to conquering Western Europe.

As an aside on Western Civilization (TM) (and to tie multiple conversations together), the main reason the West gained dominance over the world is that, while the Mongols were busy destroying everyone else’s civilization (the Chinese, the Persians, the various Arab states [the Egyptians did manage to beat them back, but only at high cost to themselves], the Russians, the great Eastern European kingdoms, etc), there simply wasn’t anything in Western Europe worth the effort of taking it. At that time, Western Europe was a backwater, persistently kept down by the overwhelming ignorance of its population and internecine warfare between various small kingdoms.

Then the mongols came, and reduced everyone else to the same state.

Interestingly, both Genghis Khan and his son, Ogedei, had plans to invade Western Europe. Ogedei even destroyed a joint Hungarian/Polish army somewhere in Eastern Europe, but I don’t recall the name of the battle off hand. As I recall, the Europeans were hobbled by all that ironwork they were carrying around. Both Khans died of natural causes before they got around to launching that planned invasion. Fortunately for the West, Mongol succession appears to have required all mongol forces going back home to fight over who got to be the next Khan.

Aw, I missed the Hilter apologist, that would’ve been fun. In my experience Holocaust deniers either believe themselves but think it would’ve been a good idea or are lying because they want another try.

@Joekster The mongol empire held together for a good while and continued to expand after Gheghis’ death and was nominally united for a very long time. Main issued seemed to be that while his decedents were generally very talented, they also tended to be raging alcoholics.

Interestingly, both Genghis Khan and his son, Ogedei, had plans to invade Western Europe. Ogedei even destroyed a joint Hungarian/Polish army somewhere in Eastern Europe, but I don’t recall the name of the battle off hand. As I recall, the Europeans were hobbled by all that ironwork they were carrying around. Both Khans died of natural causes before they got around to launching that planned invasion. Fortunately for the West, Mongol succession appears to have required all mongol forces going back home to fight over who got to be the next Khan.

Those were the battles of Legnica (9 April 1241) and Sajó River (11 April 1241.) The European defeats were less about heavy armour and more about the fact that Europeans were really bad at actual wars. The Mongols and their allies (Cumans and Turks) were a professional army who understood strategy and logistics; the Europeans outnumbered them but were mostly an aristocratic force trained to put down peasant rebellions and fight one-on-one duels, not to fight wars.

Shortly after the two battles, the Khan died and the Mongol generals needed to return to Mongolia with their armies, according to succession laws.

At Sajó River, also known as Mohi, it wasn’t just the Hungarians who lost; the army was mostly Austrian and Imperial, and represented most of the available forces of the German states. Had the Mongols not turned back, there was no army left between them and the Rhine, and it is unlikely that they could have been stopped before they reached Portugal. Europe could have been conquered, and it’s interesting to speculate on what would have happened if it had. It might have been to our benefit; a unified European state may have resulted in the same way as the Mongols created unified Russian, Chinese, Iranian and Indian states.

As they say, war is bad for all living things. It is the single most atrocious waste of resources (both human and natural) in our world. If I had to find something good to say about war, or die, I’d choose death. I have always thought that the reason men are encouraged to be angry and violent and repress most of their emotions (toxic masculinity) is because of the unquenchable thirst for cannon fodder throughout recorded history (which always seem to be mostly the record of wars). They are TOLD that they need to fight to protect “their” women — women, after all, may not fight to the same extent but they are victims just about as often. The guys you hear howling about how men have to die to defend women have just one big thing wrong — it’s not women who start wars and demand that men go fight them. I’m always nervous about women in the military because — although I understand equality — if women ever become thoroughly militarized, I don’t think there’s much hope for the survival of humanity.

People ask what it was like to be in prison. I was in Danbury, now more famous than it was in the days when the called it the Country Club, and it was a relatively soft prison filled with relatively low-violence prisoners . There was one very bad attack while I was there — six Puerto Rican guys with baseball bats and barbell bars ganged up on a French-Canadian guy they thought was a snitch. Afterwards I realized I was never in that great danger — but before you go in, you hear lots of stories, and in prison culture a draft resister is considered by definition gay (real men fight) and is subject to being treated like a woman would be on the outside. So I always like to say that Danbury was like a bad inner-city high school where they don’t let you go home at night. I think I came out stronger — my schizophrenic former wife suffered a lot more than I did. I was a sheltered, cosseted white boy who needed to learn a bit about real life. That’s where I learned a lot about how America treats black people (who were a majority in Danbury).

I met only one inmate who had served time at Alcatraz – he was close to Mandatory Release and they we trying to help him adjust to a lower level of control. I tried to befriend him but had to give up because he interpreted everything I did as a sexual advance. I suspect most women have had to give up friendships for this reason.

When I saw the short-lived Trump logo, my thought was that it reeked of power and dominance. The T-fucking-P seemed to me a symbolic assertion of the alpha male’s domination of a subordinate through sexual means rather than anything concerning consensual gay sex. In my view, his rape of Ivana was to assert his dominance; to say, in effect, you’re my wife, and I get to say when you get fucked. I think that Trump himself has an insecurity that leads to an inordinate need to constantly assert his Alphaness. It’s interesting to compare him to Obama, who always seems comfortable in his own skin and seems to rarely feel the need to consciously act like a stereotypical male. With Trump, I sometimes feel that his only real motivation is the cheering of the crowds — he’s so addicted to that that it becomes the end in itself rather than a means to getting elected. It seemed to me that whoever designed the logo was (subconsciously, at least) revealing a lot more about the reality of TrumPence than they would have wanted to.

I’m fine don’t worry 🙂
My friend is ok too, as are our families and everyone close to us.
I’m not sure whether I’m in shock about it or not to be fair, and I bet I can say the same about her too. We’ve sorta been keeping drunk since then (supposed to stop tomorrow, so yeah forgive me but this is drunk posting :s), and actually since a few days before it even happened (festival in my hometown… then one thing led to another, we rode a train from my place to hers for a few parties and that’s how I ended up in Nice on that day) so it’s really hard to tell.

Yeah we’re both in shock about another attack, but what’s striking is just… well, the irony. Those people, western civilisation and all that… and here we are, still alive because the whole idea makes us sick in the first place and we’re not such great patriots.

Right now my main thought is “suck on that, nazis”. Tomorrow when I sober up it’s probably gonna be a lot different, but hey. You never know.

@John: agree with above. Glad you’re safe, and I hope you recover well from the shock. Good luck.

@GrumpyOld: That sounds like a rather terrible experience. Thank you for sharing it.

@JoeB, Ohlman: thanks for the corrections and education. It’s been a long time since my east Asia civilizations course in undergrad. I’ve often wondered where we’d be now if the mongols ever had kept going West. I don’t know how much luck they’d have had crossing the English Channel (Kublai Khan didn’t do well with the Sea of Japan, but that’s a totally different body of water and Kublai was not Ogedai), but other then that, I do recall that they stood a good chance of sweeping Europe.

From what I remember (there are obviously people here more learned than I on this), the Mongol occupation was rather destructive, especially to civilizations that attempted to resist them. It’s been almost a decade since my classes on this, but I recall learning that the nation we now call Afghanistan was one of those, and that the Mongols went so far as to fill in all the wells in the region, which the region still has not recovered from.

@Joekster: the Mongols were very extreme. Immediate surrender meant just borrowing some craftsmen to build siege-works for them and taxes now went to them. Resistance meant the city being totally leveled and a detachment rolling through a few days later to kill anyone they had missed.

@joekster :
* Genghis Khan may not have been Napoleon, and have a completely ungovernable empire, but a lot of what he did actually stick on the conquered country, just like Napoleon’s empire crumbled even before his death but his civil administration advance were often still used by people.
* the mongol had not a snowball chance in hell to conquer Europe, who wasn’t a backwater continent either (not that prosperity help in that matter). It’s not about the quality of their army, it’s because European were *nuts* about fortification. Mongols had decent siege strategy, but they were just litteraly unable, and not exactly all that willing, to do the thousands of siege who they would have needed.

What stopped them is that it was too much effort. Their empire were already gigantic, their army weren’t out of resource yet but already extended a lot, and they were only okay at siege.

I won’t comment on the exact destructivity of it, mostly because it was great and somewhat debated, but Gengis Khan did not *just* slaughter populations. The eastern part tended to benefit more, because it was the one he actually really governed, instead of having a bunch of general doing expediency while they tried to organize.

As far as I know, the “level a city because it resisted” was way overstated. They did that. Sometime. But they did not have the will nor the manpower to do that to everyone.

A few weeks back Black Lives Matter held a protest at the Toronto Pride Parade over various issues, ie lack of representation for non-white LGBT people. But there was one point that I was unsure on, namely the removal of police floats. Recently Black Diaspora has called for Police Officers in the Ottawa Pride Parade not to march in their Uniforms: “Be there as yourself, but you don’t need to be as a representation of an oppressive institution. It doesn’t need to be that. For me at least, I don’t understand the need for people who work in the police to be in uniform to celebrate Pride ”

It’s a matter I feel torn on and I can’t decide if my issues with it are whitesplainy or not. On the one hand I understand that a lot of people of colour have had horrible experiences with the police and they have deep seated issues with systemic racism. Canada’s police force may not be anywhere close to as bad as the US’s, but that isn’t a high bar, we’ve still got the same problems.

But on the other hand it doesn’t seem like the best move to me to oppose the police as an institution making a show of supporting progressive causes because of problems in other areas. A matter of burning bridges where there might have been buildable. Having the police and Government institutions publicly supporting Pride seems like a good thing, trying to say “We don’t want to be LGBT people’s enemies anymore, we want to be on your side. We want to protect and serve you too now and for the sight of a Cop to no longer be a source of fear for you.” But on the other other hand It’s not my place to say if that message succeeds or is accurate for any non-white gay or trans person.

I feel I’m too much of a cis straight white guy to be properly sure on this issue, so I wanted to ask what people here think because I know the community here is great for topics like this.

But on the other hand it doesn’t seem like the best move to me to oppose the police as an institution making a show of supporting progressive causes because of problems in other areas.

Why not? That’s the very essence of solidarity. On top of that, the police are not a progressive institution (and intrinsically can’t be, pretty much), and it ill-behooves progressive organizations and movements to give them a fig leaf.

A matter of burning bridges where there might have been buildable.

Even if they’re not raiding the drag bars anymore, the police are far from being friends of the TBLG community, especially the T portion of that, not even those of us who are white. PoCs get it worse, of course. In a lot of places, being a trans woman of colour is in and of itself enough to be arrested on prostitution charges. No police department is any ally of ours, nor is any movement that builds bridges with them a movement that represents me.

Having the police and Government institutions publicly supporting Pride seems like a good thing, trying to say “We don’t want to be LGBT people’s enemies anymore, we want to be on your side. We want to protect and serve you too now and for the sight of a Cop to no longer be a source of fear for you.” But on the other other hand It’s not my place to say if that message succeeds or is accurate for any non-white gay or trans person.

That’s nice. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions say something completely different. I don’t give a flying fuck what PR bullshit they spout, and never will.

SO many questions. I’m in school now and I have ADHD, and I have /years/ of school left (have to get a pHD to work on the stuff I’m interested in) and it’s so overwhelming sometimes! Also congratulations! Also also, joekstra sounds really familiar, I keep thinking I’ve seen that name around somewhere else. In any case, welcome. 🙂

@kat

We could make it a meme. 😛 “Poodle don’t like you” = ???

@Grumpy re: Pence

I think it’s smart on Pence’s part, because this way he can reframe the election. Instead of him not getting re-elected because people in Indiana hate him (at least around here they do), he’s not running for governor because he’s going for something so! much! better!

It’s still ridiculous, and he’s still a shitty person, but he can save his self-image, at least.

I think you’re on to something about Trump’s insecurity. When you look at his father and how his father treated him, I can totally see how he would be insecure and seek to mitigate that by dominance; that seems to be the only way his father ever related to anyone, and growing up with that sort of mindset…. ugh. I don’t /want/ to feel pity for him, not while he’s encouraging harm, but here we are.

@SinkableJohn

Glad you’re ok. Be safe and be kind to yourself; that’s a hell of a thing to go through.

American cheese is too cheese! What else would it be!? An alien life form which has yet to figure out how to either stop replicating itself endlessly, how to stop people from eating those replications, or a combination of those?!

Someone get that wild haired scientist guy, the one who always says “That? Oh, totally Aliens.” kinds of stuff. The pyramids, electronic devices, probably American cheese…:P

@SinkableJohn
Say safe, we’re all rooting for ya.
@Skybison
I really hope the institutions would go so far as to support these people with their actions, PR don’t work in a world where it’s inherently considered insincere/making excuses.

In other OT news the failed coup in Turkey, why is it that I get a feeling that a tyrant like Erdogan would intentionally create a small, ineffective coup like this, so he can use it as an excuse to administer even more power over his people? Maybe I’m just being paranoid here, since recently I’ve just been reading CIA documents that sound exactly like the plot of every supervillain ever.

SinkableJohn: if it’s any solace, you have to be pretty unlucky to get actually physically hurt by a random attack like this one. Of the tens of thousands of people on the promenade, “only” a couple hundred were actually hit. If you had been jolly drunk on the beach singing about watering your garden with blood (as one does) you’d almost certainly have been physically OK. Probably you wouldn’t have even seen anything.

Example: it seems my parents watched the fireworks a whole two blocks from where the truck stopped. They survived completely unhurt, though they’re a bit shook-up (and not answering their phone, though they are emailing and texting me).

@Ooglyboggles:
Given the way the Turkish army leadership have felt about Erdogan for years now and how slow they’ve been to obey his orders, I’d be very surprised if they’re willing to do his dirty work in a thing like this.

@EJ (The Other One)
It’s just that Turkey has a history of successful military coups, so this one seems a little odd in comparison to the rest to me. Though once this is all figured out I might be able to see exactly what different circumstances would cause this one to fail comparative to the other 4 military coups, and the one soft coup.

Given the way the Turkish army leadership have felt about Erdogan for years now and how slow they’ve been to obey his orders, I’d be very surprised if they’re willing to do his dirty work in a thing like this.

One theory I’ve seen advanced is that Erdogan was planning a purge of the military, and a bunch of officers who got wind of it tried to stage a coup to forstall it. Being a spur of the moment thing, it wasn’t well planned, and didn’t work.

It’s quite hard these days to plot even a small coup and keep it secret; and Erdogan does have a reasonably good internal intelligence service. I think it’s plausible (although I’m not suggesting it’s actually the case) that he did know about the coup in advance and allowed it to happen knowing he could nip it in the bud. That strengthens his position, identifies the major threats to his regime and allows him to purge those threats.

He may even have used a few agent provocateurs to ensure the coup went off early at a time of his choosing and before too many people expressed a willingness to take part.

Of course allowing such a thing is risky; he could underestimate the amount of support and it could gain a momentum he couldn’t control. But you don’t get to run a place like Turkey for 13 years without a bit of self confidence.

It would be interesting to analyse whether there had been any preparation for a counter coup. Were for instance police rotas changed in the days before? Were there preparations to control the media and comms such as Internet?

Of course it’s more likely it was just as it seems; an all or nothing attempt by elements of an increasingly frustrated military.

The secular guard, as the Turkish military likes to think of itself was already purged back in the early-mid noughties. The current stand is actually surprising a lot of people, since they thought that the military’s spine was already crippled to the point that it wouldn’t be able to do anything resembling an actual coup after the 2007?-ish failure. For a few decades though the Turkish military was quite similar in appearance and action to the old Varangian guard.

What you’re witnessing now is more likely a poorly planned thrashing of an already dead animal. The 80s weren’t that long ago, a great many people still remember those years and the coup then was much more bloody. You’ll note how they called for thrushing out people into the streets and plazas and general public assembly areas; Erdogan was playing a game of chicken and just like before the factions involved within the military aren’t going to come out and actually roll. There just isn’t enough of it left to do so, not without a really bloody go of it.

This is just a power grab for him now, and he’ll definitely act accordingly. He might have helped set the wheels in motion but it was more of a forest-level political scenario and not so much a tree-level one.

Off topic a bit – the really scary thing to me is how… accurate certain predictions are becoming. Prior to joining the military I was in some PS400 level classes that went over details such as China / Formosa Straights / Middle East action and reaction. And a lot of it is coming true. Okay, not exactly the Formosa Straights but… waaay too close for comfort. I can remember my instructors harping on “15 years from now” over and over again. Well, that was 2001. And the world is looking waaaaaay too similar to those scenarios, and that is daaaaaammmnnn scary. I wonder if the model about the de-escalation of world wars / conflicts that was thrown around to describe the ‘lay of the land’ in and following the Cold War will hold true or not.

@skybison: i can understand how you feel. I know that i, as a cis-white queer girl, have never had any problems with the police. I always have problems not trusting people to do the right thing! I was terrible watching for shoplifters at blockbuster, waaay back in the day. It never made sense to me for someone to steal a game or dvd?

(I am trying to be aware of the privilege that i have that has let me live in this world still this naive. Everyone should feel like this. It’s bullshit that they don’t.)

On the other hand though… Carding is only going to stop come the new year. As a cis white girl, i have never been carded. Strange how that happens?

I would love to build bridges to the people who are supposed to be protecting us. But they need to actually be protecting all of us, and while i’m sad that my roommate’s first visit to the parade was mostly during the time they stopped, i can’t blame BLM for their actions.

It’s like when you have to deal with a problematic relative. Do you smile and pretend everything is fine, because they are currently making an effort with you? What if they are horrible to your partner? Do you let the event continue, because they are being awful to only one person?

Sometimes you need to draw attention to the bad behaviour. You probably wkn’t change the relative’s mind, but you have a chance of shaping someone else’s opinions, hopefully for the better.

Nothing ever seems to get done or change until people are loud in some way.

The Carnegie Emdowment for International Peace (who are usually pretty good at this sort of thing) are going with your theory that the coup was a last minute attempt to forestall a purge. They suggest that it was an ad hoc affair with no planning; hence the rather haphazard approach and the failure to take obvious steps such as trying to seize control of all media outlets and ensuring rapid mobilisation and deployment of their forces to key areas.

To be fair, it wasn’t that they failed in taking those steps, it’s that they failed in accomplishing them and completing the arrest. The military during the initial stage movement did go after utilities and media but it didn’t hold onto them. From the outside looking in, it looks as if the faction launching the coup kinda “gave up the ghost” after the arrest failed.

I’m also weary of the “prevent a purge” notion. They’ve been under ongoing purges for a long while, and there was a massive set after the last failed coup / political bullying attempt ( what is a lesser coup called anyway? I always just hear it referred to as a coup ). If the numbers of “arrested” military with Erdogan’s rhetoric of “bring them out and make them pay before everyone” are the going rate, you can’t think the military didn’t know the forgone conclusion for a failure; what was at risk.

It looks, again – from the outside – that they just gave up and accepted an “inevitable” when the arrest failed rather than push into full scale civil war that likely would have involved civvy massacre. Maybe if the faction had had more public support, but you would have needed a situation where two very dynamic groups were in collusion which is a bit difficult to do in Turkey right now.

I watched a video on BBCiPlayer last night about Trump and hate, very disturbing, it made me angry, and they have only scratched the surface. This hate is out of control. In my country, all the Nazis crawled out of the woodwork over Brexit. We’re seeing more and more clashes between brown shirts and antifas on the streets. We’re seeing nazis vandalise graves of dead Labour leaders. We’re seeing actual, real murder of MPs. I had to make my point clear to a friend last week that centrist politics is dead. He is a fence sitter, a Liberal Democrat. He does not agree with my Marxism. He thinks he’s in the right place, being neither fish nor fowl. I told him how quickly the U.S. Europe and Britain is sliding into fascism. He is slow to belive that, no matter how much evidence of hate crime, trolling and obnoxious behavior he can see. The Liberals are right wing, not centrist. They have no option but to be pulled into the prevailing political sphere. When we have a situation like the USA, only Torys and Whigs and no workers party, who will oppose Fascism?

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